DadaMidiPop by Buttress O'Kneel
"It's a godawful mess of misplayed piano garbage. Either that, or it's brilliant conceptual sound art! You decide!
When Buttress discovered that certain online mp3-to-midi converters create the vocal part out of weird atonal harmonics, turning pop into avant-garde at the touch of a button, of course her path was clear - shove a whole buncha pop into it and release it all as Compop 24.0: DadaMidiPop. I mean, you would've done the same, right? Of course, B'O'K being B'O'K, she also ran the conversion on a collection of acapellas too, which all happened to be Metallica acapellas. There's three on this release. James Hetfield's heyheys and yeahs are transformed into abstract pianos before our very ears, and it's awesome. Or terrible! Like I said earlier, you be the judge.
After playing with these programs for a while, Buttress also discovered that the midi-to-mp3 re-converter could replay the midi files at variable tempos, so the very last cut on this album is Radiohead's haunting Pyramid Song, converted into avant-harmonic-piano-midi, then re-converted at half-speed. Instead of simply stretching the piece, as a tool like Paul's Stretch would have done, this time-stretch is just the notes played slower, rather than the sounds elongated. Which is just amazing. Or a fucking crock of pretentious swill. It totally depends on you."
Department of Relativistic Ambivalence
IWML
2018
Tracklist
Credits
License
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.
“Words like "mashup" and "remix" don't really do justice to Buttress O'Kneel's method - Top 40 pop crap gets sliced, diced, and tossed into a dizzying, exciting hardcore electro stew. Compared to other djs who timidly drop a Vanilla Ice acapella over a Chemical Bros intro just to move a dance floor, O'Kneel shreds copyrights with a blood-curdling vehemence. Smash the state!”
- Music 4 Maniacs